Tag Archives: Emergent

Rule of Three

Blog post series

This blog post is part of a series about legacy coderetreat and legacy code techniques you can apply during your work. Please click to see more sessions about legacy code.

Purpose

The rule of three says:

Extract duplication only when you see it the third time.

This concept is extremely useful when you want to improve legacy code, refactor in the TDD cycle or just improve existing code that is covered by tests.

The Rule of Three brings higher coherence and more clarity to the system, because the duplicated code starts to be moved into specialized areas. In this way we optimize the code base for changeability.

The Rule of Three prevents from prematurely extracting possible duplication and defers the duplication minimization until we have enough proof.